I wanted Nostalgia to be free of anything irrelevant or incidental that would stand in the way of my principal objective: the portrayal of someone in a state of profound alienation from the world and himself, unable to find a balance between reality and the harmony for which he longs, in a state of nostalgia provoked not only by his remoteness from home but also by a global yearning for the wholeness of existence. Andrei Tarkovsky, Nostalgia (1983)